When an aircraft, and in particular an aircraft moving at high speed such as a fighter plane, lands on a runway in a nose-up attitude, ground contact is initially made by means of the main landing gear before the secondary landing gear or nose wheel comes into contact with the runway.
This results in the aircraft running a non-negligible distance along the run way in the nose-up attitude.
In the prior art, and with very few exceptions, the pilot can control the aircraft's braking by any suitable means in order to stop the aircraft in as short a time and as short a distance as possible, only once the wheels of all three landing gears have made contact with the ground.
Particularly, but not exclusively, in this aviation context, there is a need to keep aircraft on a runway for as little time as possible. This can be for safety reasons, or to free the runway for other aircraft to land as soon as possible after an earlier landing, or perhaps more commonly, simply to use a very short length of runway.
On analyzing prior art braking systems, such as those outlined above, it can be seen that braking commences only once all three wheels or sets of wheels, ie. two main landing gear and one nose gear, have made contact with the ground. A large portion of the runway, sometimes several hundreds of meters long, is thus not used for aircraft braking, thereby causing runways to be relatively long.
Preferred implementations of the present invention provide a method of selectively controlling aircraft braking on landing as soon as there is ground contact, thereby slowing down the aircraft as soon as possible and thus shortening the length of runway required.
The present invention also relates to apparatus for implementing the method.